Do you believe us now? Police state militarization of USA was foretold by alternative media

Thursday, August 14, 2014
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: police militarization, Ferguson, alternative media

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(NaturalNews) For the past decade, alternative news websites like Natural News, Info Wars, SHTFplan.com and many others have repeatedly warned about the alarming militarization of domestic police forces across the United States. The response from the mostly liberal mainstream media was raucous laughter and denial. "Government is good!" we were told. "We need strong police forces to fight the..." (fill in the blank with your favorite fictional enemy such as "domestic terrorists" or "the war on drugs" or "protesters.")

But today, the exact scenario the alternative media has been warning you about for ten years is here. The Ferguson (St. Louis) riots have erased all denials and delusions. Police are now soldiers of war rigged up with bomb-proof armored vehicles made for military assaults, automatic weapons, desert camouflage uniforms, Darth Vader-like masks, grenades, laser sniper sights and more.

"The intensive militarization of America's police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction," said Glenn Greenwald, the journalist best known for breaking the news of Edward Snowden and the NSA. (6) He goes on to say:

It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of "homeland security." This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.

Even Newsweek magazine, an unbridled cheerleader for statist agendas, had to admit the obvious, saying: (1)

As many have noted, Ferguson, Missouri, currently looks like a war zone. And its police -- kitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles -- are indistinguishable from soldiers.

Pentagon now arming U.S. police with weapons designed to create maximum human casualties

This is all by design. The National Defense Authorization Act of 1990 allowed the federal government to "transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition, that the Secretary determines is - (A) suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities; and (B) excess to the needs of the Department of Defense."

This program set off a wave of police departments across the country acquiring military machinery and soldier-of-war weapons that have no business in the hands of a domestic police force tasked with "keeping the peace." Under the program, a total of 400 armored vehicles, 500 aircraft and 93,000 automatic weapons were transferred to local police, reports the National Journal. (4) The transfers continue to this day.

All of these weapons and vehicles were designed to be used on the battlefield: a place where the primary mission is to kill as many enemies as possible. Their very engineering prioritizes the achievement of mass casualties. Nothing in this weaponry was ever designed to "keep the peace." So what happens when domestic police forces get their hands on this gear? They enter the realm of "soldier role playing."

Cops playing soldier

I know cops. I was a board member of a city police force volunteer organization for two years in Arizona. I've trained at their facilities and even spent some time teaching cops Defensive Tactics (D.T.) against edged weapons. Cops are great people, by the way. They also love beer. And the only thing cops love more than beer is TOYS.

"Toys," in cop lingo, means any contraption with macho appeal: big guns, big vehicles, big helicopters, big chest rigs and so on. Automatic weapons make cops drool with near-sexual arousal. Armored vehicles make cops want to find something to smash with them. And night-vision gear makes cops want to find somebody to raid at night, just to try out their new gear.

Cop life is 99% boring most of the time. It's filled with paperwork, desk duties, paperwork, training classes, paperwork, skills tests, and did I say paperwork? Just as much as anyone else, cops are looking for thrills to wake them from the sleepy slumber of the daily grind. Armored vehicles, full-auto assault rifles, tactical soldier gear and flash bang grenades give these cops something interesting to do. So they take all this gear, put it on, and they get to play Soldier of Fortune. The donning of masks even allows them to pursue this role playing without fear of being identified in citizen videos, further encouraging aggressive behavior on their part.

Role playing turns good people into sadistic killers

Do not discount the power of role playing. The infamous Stanford Prison Experiment proved that people will take on the role you give them and become the "soldier" they are expected to be. As explained by study author Philip Zimbardo:

Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

All it takes, in other words, for regular, everyday people to be transformed into sadistic guards is to put them in a uniform and give them a role to play.

That's what cops are now doing nationwide when they "play soldier" with the Pentagon's surplus weapons and vehicles. Cops are not bad people at heart, but when they take on this role playing, the role takes over their rational mind and they begin to play out a sadistic, power-hungry archetype that positions the public as "the enemy" which needs to be eliminated with the help of the Pentagon's weapons of war.

Journalists tear-gassed and detained at gunpoint

This is how you get police firing tear gas grenades at TV journalists as is clearly shown in the video below:



The journalists had to flee on foot, and after they successfully escaped, the police dismantled their television gear.

This is also how journalists who once believed "Big Government can do no wrong" are now being arrested and thrown in holding cells in Ferguson. Huffington Post reporter Ryan J. Reilly and Washington Post staffer Wesley Lowery both got arrested at gunpoint and detained in total violation of their civil rights, then released a few hours later without explanation.

The police state the liberal media once championed, it seems, is now turning against them. Here's the video of one of these journalists being arrested at gunpoint by a militarized police offer running what can only be called a police state:

Alternative media warned you about this for the last ten years

Right now, the mainstream media owes the alternative media a huge apology. We warned you about this, and despite all the accusations of "conspiracy theorists" hurled by the statist mainstream media, we kept alerting you to this issue, warning that the police state was growing out of control.

And now we've arrived. America is, right this very moment, living under an undeclared state of Martial Law. Your constitutional rights have been revoked. This was evident in the police behavior following the Boston Marathon bombings, yet most Americans preferred to remain in a state of denial about that, too. (Remember when Boston police forced innocent families out of their homes at gunpoint? Most Americans stood by and said nothing...)

Black America is more awake than White America

Care to take a guess who best knows the truth about what's really coming in America? Black America. It's the African-Americans whose eyes are now wide open, taking in the reality of the militarized streets of America that now confront them. That's why African-Americans are so angry in Ferguson, I believe: it's not just the apparent murder of one of their own by a police officer; it's also the jack-booted military police response that evokes all the historical pain of a population which already suffered through an era of oppression and injustice.

Trust me when I say that black Americans will absolutely not put up with being treated like cattle being rounded up at gunpoint. And I don't blame them. "Freedom" has been hard fought in this country, and none of us are going to give it up without some push back (and protests). Of course, from the point of view of the police, they are tasked with keeping the peace, and while they do have the right to stop vandalism and destruction of private property, achieving that with the Pentagon's weapons of war is only going to escalate the situation and incite more violence, which is the opposite of what the police claim they're trying to accomplish.

Who brought the violence to Ferguson, Missouri? The Pentagon did. The streets of America are now a de facto war zone where the government has declared war on its own citizens.



Meanwhile, White America largely remains in a state of clueless delusion about all this, still pretending America is a "free country" where civil liberties are respected by the government. City-dwelling white people, for the most part, still suffer under the delusion that "the police state will never come for me." They think they're immune to the whims of the state because, in their own words, "I haven't done anything wrong."

"Democide" is government-run murder

Neither did the Jews in 1939, of course. Doing something wrong isn't a prerequisite to being rounded up, forcibly knelt on the edge of a mass grave, and having a bullet fired through your skull. Governments do that with regularity, as is clearly evidenced by the historical record of governments gone bad. Over a quarter of a billion murders in the 20th century are attributable to "democide" -- the killing of innocent people by governments.

The important thing to realize about democide is that to pull it off, you first have to accomplish three very important things on a national scale. All three of these things have been aggressively pursued by the Obama administration:

#1) Disarm the population.
#2) Escalate the military armament of the police.
#3) "Legalize" the killing of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. (Obama achieved this by signing the NDAA.)

Now it's only a matter of time before the government invokes some emergency -- a pandemic outbreak, a nuclear accident, a solar flare, an outbreak of riots, etc. -- as an excuse to nullify the Bill of Rights, arrest all the journalists and start shooting all protesters on sight. To accomplish this, government has already armed local police with the efficient killing machines of war. There is no other purpose for such a domestic arms buildup, by the way.

We warned you once already, and most people didn't listen. Are you ready to wake up and listen now? "Ferguson, Missouri is under military occupation right now, and the entire world is watching in horror as militarized police fire tear gas and rubber bullets at unarmed protesters," wrote Michael Snyder of End of the American Dream:

Sadly, this is just a preview of what is coming to America in the years ahead. As the economy falls apart and people become even more angry and even more frustrated, there will be a lot more incidents of civil unrest like we have just witnessed in Ferguson. And in response, the federal government and our overly militarized police will seek to crush those uprisings with overwhelming force.

Sources for this article include:
(1) http://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-police-...
(2) http://www.prisonexp.org/
(3) http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/0...
(4) http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/how-...
(5) http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/th...
(6) https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/14/militarization-u-s-police-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson/